IANAL but as far as I know, if you think you've found some kind of technicality or gotcha in a legal letter or email that means you can ignore it, you're probably wrong.<p>Ignoring the legal process can result in seized domains and servers, services being taken down, lawyers obtaining all kinds of personal information through the courts, and other stuff that gets very expensive very quickly. I doubt that this person will be extradited for making a Youtube frontend, but fighting Google can be certified Not Fun.<p>If you're going to ignore a cease and desist, consider getting legal advice from an expert with relevant knowledge first. They will tell you what can and cannot happen if you ignore letters like these. Perhaps they can word your protest in a more legalese form that Google will need to respond to if it wants to actually pursue the matter; it's certainly possible that getting actual lawyers involved to overthrow a realistic defence will be too much for Google to actually care. Youtubers certainly seem to get the velvet glove treatment after their message exchange with Youtube representatives mention lawyers.<p>There are probably ways in which the project can be defended (for example, if it really doesn't use the API in any way I don't believe it can be subject to their terms and conditions) but "you used the wrong opening for your email" and "Invidious *is*." isn't it.
While I'm sympathetic to people running alternative frontends and I use another such project (nitter) myself, nitpicking on the language is unlikely to help the author of this blog post, and I think they'd be better off consulting a lawyer on this one.<p>On Github[1] and invidious.io[2] they say they're the project manager and manage finances, which puts them in a leadership role, and therefore capable of directing the project, including cessation of its operation. Imagine if a CEO started nitpicking about how it's "not their product or service" and it was the company maintaining it, and how they weren't a low level employee and thus not responsible for the activities of the company.<p>And even if we are to assume that "project manager" is simply an honorary position, there is a level of implied responsibility even in these positions. As an example, CEO positions often inch closer to being honorary, as demonstrated by some CEOs being on the boards of multiple companies.<p>It is a different question as to whether the cessation of its operation is an effective measure or not, or whether running alternative frontends should be a violation of a law. Imagine a situation where Alice and their friends bully Bob. Bob gets a restraining order against Alice, and Alice argues that their friends like to bully Bob as well, so a restraining order against Alice won't help. "Other people can also do it" isn't a valid legal defense, even when it is true.<p>It's also interesting that they didn't release the full letter sent by Google. I wonder if it's actually a C&D but the author simply hopes that they can avoid complying with it only because it uses "To Whom It May Concern", which is standard legal verbiage.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/TheFrenchGhosty">https://github.com/TheFrenchGhosty</a><p>[2] <a href="https://invidious.io/team/" rel="nofollow">https://invidious.io/team/</a>
There are a lot of problems with this response, but it makes one argument in particular that seems very foolish and I have not seen otherwise mentioned: that Invidious is somehow not subject to YouTube terms because it doesn't use the public API.<p>But it does load the videos from YouTube's media CDN - so if the author is making the claim that Invidious is not using YouTube "the service" when it still relies on YouTube infrastructure for the heavy lifting this seems... Actually worse? It takes a contract issue over the terms and makes it into something more like a CFAA issue, since Invidious is consuming YouTube resources without, the author claims, using anything intended as a public service.<p>Obviously this analogy is inexact but it feels like telling the electrical utility that they can't sue you because you aren't using their electrical service, you're tapping the wires <i>before</i> the meter. You kind of want to be governed by the terms of a service because that tends to mean that whatever you're doing is something you're allowed to do, and not outright abuse.
Author says "I am not Invidious", but they are in fact the project manager of Invidious.<p>Some of the quotes are laugh out loud funny to me:<p>"Invidious received an e-mail from Google/YouTube to ask the project to be stopped.<p>...<p>I’m not stopping my work on Invidious, so here’s the explanation:<p>The e-mail is addressed “To Whom It May Concern”, the reality is that it doesn’t “concern” me.<p>...<p>If Google/YouTube want me to stop, they just have to ask me to stop"<p>Google clearly asked you to stop and you didn't. Continue at your own legal peril.
It's not clear to me <i>why</i> they would stop contributing to an open source video player, just because Google wants them to.<p>That aside, I imagine invidious (app) servers which allow users to watch content from Google's servers <i>may</i> be candidates for shutdown.<p>For example, here's a random video from the front page of an invidous server about the reddit blackout (I haven't watched it): <a href="https://yewtu.be/watch?v=fBruoybHryU" rel="nofollow">https://yewtu.be/watch?v=fBruoybHryU</a><p>But the video itself is coming from
<a href="https://rr1---sn-ux3n588t-t8ge.googlevideo.com/" rel="nofollow">https://rr1---sn-ux3n588t-t8ge.googlevideo.com/</a><p>I assume this would be nominally legal under the same reasoning that hotlinking images is legal. If hotlinking images is found to be <i>illegal</i> though (which I think Google is powerful enough to force), then I think Google is going to have to do some reorganizing of their index (see case where someone sued Google, and lost, because Google was prominently displaying a website that hotlinked their image: <a href="https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/16/google_search_image_results_hotlinking_high_court/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/16/google_search_image_r...</a>)<p>So it's an interesting one to watch for precedent, but I don't think Google is going to want to force courts to agree that hotlinking another website is infringement, because they'd potentially have to deindex 90% of the internet.<p>On the other hand, their search result quality has reduced so drastically of late, maybe they don't care about this.
> Invidious isn’t my project, I don’t own the “Invidious” trademark, I’m not Invidious, I don’t represent Invidious. I’m just… me.
> Invidious <i>is</i>.<p>The post comes off as a little idealistic and dismissive. I hope they have given enough thought and have sufficient countermeasures in place for the project if the law disagree with their view.
> They don't understand that we never agreed to any of their TOS/policies, they don't understand that we don't use their API.<p>yeah, they DEFINITELY DO:<p><a href="https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/blob/e7bed765/src/invidious/yt_backend/youtube_api.cr">https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/blob/e7bed765/src/invidi...</a><p>not sure what backwards logic they are using to come to this conclusion, but its objectively wrong, and wont hold up in court. Granted, I am also guilty of this in my own project, but I dont pretend that I am not using the API, I just dont care because my project is tiny. They no longer have that luxury.
The content of the email was posted to the Github issues[1] for those wondering.<p>Edit: I'll add that it centers on Youtube's API usage, which Invidious doesn't use so there's some ambiguity in how it relates to the project.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/3872">https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/3872</a>
A person owns their contributions unless they release them.<p>The letter does state that its referring to API clients, while invidious works via scraping instead, to not need to deal with the API terms. This is considered different legally. Dunno how this'll play out though.
google has made the lives of people easier by providing free services like youtube, maps, email and a few others. They have the right to put ads on their stuff and make revenue out of that. what this guy is actually bad for people. imagine if people all of a sudden start using invidious and stop using youtube then there will not be youtube in this future. A lot of people feel the same.
This feels potentially a bit duplicitous. YouTube is filled with copyright infringing material, which Google capitalizes on to bring in viewers to ads. Granted, they have hosting costs. I wonder what the legal situation is for such instances.